STIRLING

Well. When we woke up yesterday, it was to strong winds and heavy rain – as predicted.

Though, to be honest, the weather wasn’t quite as bad as the apocalyptic conditions that the BBC had been gleefully forecasting the day before. I think ever since Mr Fish famously dismissed the impending “hurricane” of 1987 the BBC have been want to be over cautious.
Anyway. It wasn’t ideal 10k conditions. But that was tough, because that’s exactly what we had in store. The Stirling 10k to be precise.
Got through in good time and picked up our numbers and chips.
Met up with Nick and went into the nearby Sports Centre to pin my number to my vest and fix my chip to my shoe. Then we headed off into the storm for a bit of a warm up.
Met up with Theresa and Brian as well. To discover that Brian had developed an Autumnal Lurgy and had made the decision not to run (always a tough decision to make, but probably the right one).
After our warm up we got to the start pretty much just in time. There’s never really any preamble or announcements with this race – just “bang” and your off. Never managed to get as close to the front of the start as I would have liked though.
The first couple of kilometres are pretty uninspiring as you seem to dodge round roundabouts and do a sort of circuit of a rather non-descript industrial estate. As my start hadn’t been ideal I got a bit boxed in and I seemed to spend a lot of time here trying to get past people and get up towards the front a bit.
Soon thinned out a bit though and I seemed to find my pace and just settled into it.
I’m sure one or two people passed me, but it seemed to be the sort of race where I was picking people off most of the way.
Out over a wee pedestrian bridge, a bit of a “country” lane, a “u-turn” round a traffic cone and we were heading back.
All the while the rain seemed to have either let up quite a  bit, and the wind didn’t seem to be bothering me too much. Till about the 8k mark, when the road starts a slight climb and the route heads back into the industrial estate. I did feel my pace start to slow a wee bit there, but I just tried to keep my head down and get on with the job in hand.
Happy enough with my time (36:23). Given that the conditions were much better last year, I’ve also got to be happy that I was about 20 seconds faster this year.
Nick wasn’t too far behind me, so we hung about to watch the others come in. We were joined by Brian who had enough time after the start of the race to grab a coffee before the runners started coming back in (an eminently sensible thing to do in those conditions).

Anne had a good run – OR SO SHE SAYS – Her timing chip “fell off” during the race so her time will not appear in the official results. She claims that Nick, Theresa and Sheila all saw here out on the route. All I will say is…….I never. But then again because of the rain I was running without my specs J

Strangely enough, Nick – who I did see – hasn’t turned up on the results either.

 

My next three or so weekends are going to be dedicated to long un’s now before the main show in October – the York Marathon.